In a case that shocked India, Suraj Kumar was sentenced to a rare double life term for murdering his wife using one of the world’s deadliest snakes.
The 28-year-old systematically plotted to kill his wife Uthra by forcing a cobra to bite her.
In April 2021, Suraj paid 7,000 rupees ($92; £67) for a spectacled cobra, purchasing it illegally from a snake catcher named Suresh Kumar in Kerala.
The tragic story began with an arranged marriage between Suraj, the son of an auto-rickshaw driver, and Uthra, who suffered from learning disabilities but came from a wealthy family.
Uthra slept on the bed on the left in this room where she was killed
The marriage was facilitated by a matrimonial broker, with Uthra’s family providing a substantial dowry including 768 grams of gold (worth about $32,000 at today’s rates), a Suzuki sedan, and 400,000 rupees (approximately $5,263) in cash. They also provided Suraj with a monthly allowance of 8,000 rupees ($105) to care for their daughter.
However, behind the façade of matrimonial life, Suraj was plotting his wife’s death.
According to investigators, he first purchased a Russell’s viper for 10,000 rupees ($132) from Suresh. After a failed attempt to have the snake bite Uthra on their home’s first floor, Suraj tried again in March.
Police found the plastic container in which Suraj kept the cobra that killed his wife
This time, as investigators reported, he sedated his wife with doctored pudding and released the viper in their bedroom. The snake bit Uthra, sending her to the hospital for 52 days and requiring three painful skin transplant surgeries.
“Cobras don’t bite unless you provoke them, Suraj had to catch it by its hood and force it to bite his wife,” explained Mavish Kumar, a herpetologist.
The cobra bit her twice, delivering fatal venom that would paralyze her respiratory muscles.
As Uthra’s mother, Manimekhala Vijayan, recounted to police, when she entered the room the next morning, she found her daughter “with her mouth open, and her left hand dangling on one side.” When she asked Suraj why he hadn’t checked on Uthra, he replied, “I didn’t want to disturb her sleep.”
The investigation revealed Suraj’s methodical planning. “While his wife was in the hospital, Suraj was trawling the internet about handling snakes and learning about snake venom,” said Anoop Krishna, one of the investigators.
According to investigators, Suraj had been plotting the murder since his son Dhruv’s birth in 2019.
“Snakebite cases are common in Kerala, so we didn’t suspect any foul play here,” said Vijayasenan Vidhyadharan, Uthra’s father. About 60,000 people die of snakebite in India every year.
“He planned it meticulously and succeeded in the third attempt,” said Apukuttan Ashok, the lead investigating police officer. Public prosecutor Mohanraj Gopalakrishnan called the case a “milestone in police investigations in India, when prosecutors could decisively prove that an animal was used as a weapon of murder.”
The prosecution built their case with more than 90 witnesses, including herpetologists and doctors.
As Mavish Kumar testified during a crime scene recreation: “Cobras are not very active at night. Every time we dropped a cobra on the supine dummy, it slithered to the floor and went into a dark corner of the room. Even when we provoked the cobra, it did not try to bite.”
Judge M Manoj, who presided over the case, described it as a “diabolical and ghastly uxoricide.” The case concluded with Suraj receiving a double life sentence, and according to Gopalakrishnan, the convicted murderer showed no remorse for his actions.
Editor’s Note:
This article is based on reporting by Soutik Biswas and Ashraf Padanna for BBC News, detailing the murder case of Uthra in Kerala, India, where a cobra was used as a murder weapon. All quotes and facts are directly sourced from their original coverage.